HMRC’s agricultural attempts to chase charity
This week’s Blog concerns HMRC planting seeds of doubt on the status of an event organised by a charity to raise funds; and having planted the seeds HMRC proceeded to reap a tax harvest by refusing a VAT claim and combining this with an assessment for underpaid tax Charity & VAT: Background The Yorkshire Agricultural […]
 Tax Expertise Marginalised
After ignoring concerns from professional bodies about HMRC service levels and treating the Office of Tax Simplification more like an annoying wasp buzzing in its ear, the government gives the distinct impression that it doesn’t want to listen to tax experts. A budget without expert input Prior to this year’s Spring Budget, the various professional […]
Offside whistle blown on HMRC
Today’s Blog concerns a football agent who received €4m for their part in an international transfer deal, zero-rated the transaction in their records, but then HMRC stepped in, demanding 20% VAT on the deal. VAT & Football Transfers: Background Sports Invest UK Ltd are a VAT-registered football agent in the UK and operate under the […]
Your tax needs to be paid twice!
It emerged recently, that HMRC had effectively asked thousands of taxpayers to pay the same tax bill twice, after the tax office issued paper copies of tax assessments that had already been paid. Regrettably though, these paper copies did not indicate anywhere on them that they were indeed copies and for all intents and purposes, […]
Tax needs to be simplified
The Office of Tax Simplification (OTS) was set up in 2010 as an independent body to advise the Chancellor and provide feedback from consultations with industry, taxpayers, professional bodies and accountants. It came after a major Parliamentary report in 1995 which promoted a major drive to rewrite and simplify most of the then current tax […]
5 examples of UK tax inequalities
As a tax accountant and blogger, I often think about the UK tax system. The more I looked, the clearer it became that the UK tax system treats certain taxpayers differently to others, which leads to unfairness in terms of the amount of tax paid on similar levels of income. So today I thought I’d […]
Homeworking – Is it here to stay?
The third anniversary of the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the plague of biblical proportions that devasted the UK and most of the world, has recently passed and the world as we know it, has permanently changed. At the time, no-one on the planet had any real idea what the future would hold. Worldwide millions […]
HMRC tries to scrap paper tax returns
In the latest tax notice to accountants, HMRC announced that it had bowed to pressure from the various accountancy bodies, the FSB (Federation of Small Businesses), Age Concern and various other bodies, that it had decided not to scrap paper tax returns. A victory for commonsense you might think, but as is HMRC’s way, there […]
VAT Turns 50
Many Happy Returns, VAT. Yes, it’s true, everyone’s favourite tax celebrated its 50th birthday on 1st April, which is quite appropriate given that it was April’s Fools day. But rather than giving three cheers we should be asking whether this complex tax will ever be simplified, as successive governments have promised. VAT Turns 50: Golden […]
Bank of England has raised rates, again
In light of the latest figures on inflation, with a jump to 10.4% during February, the Bank of England (BoE) has once again decided to raise UK interest rates by 0.25%, taking the current rate of interest to 4.25%, its highest figure since the banking crisis of October 2008. The BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) […]
